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Social work teachers and software specialists Mark Doel and Tarsem Singh Cooner describe how their web-based interactive software could ease the difficulties surrounding practice placements.

There is much talk about the new three-year social work degree and, in particular, how agencies are going to cope with the expectation that 50 per cent of a student's time should be spent on placement. Fifty per cent of three years is much more than 50 per cent of two years, and there is a real concern that this additional load will not be manageable in many areas.

However, there is a developing consensus that we need an understanding of "practice learning" as encompassing the whole of the student's course, not just the placement. Indeed, practice learning continues after qualification, for as long as practitioners reflect on their practice. Of course, the context of practice learning has an enormous impact on the kind of learning which students experience. "Live" practice learning provides the immediacy and spontaneity of direct contact with service users in an agency context. This directness is a unique feature of live practice learning.

Once we are agreed that the whole of a social work student's education is about practice learning, we are free to consider a wide range of possibilities for the context for this learning. Computer software may provide one of these contexts.

We decided to create a computer-based programme to help students prepare for live practice learning - and soon realised that we faced a number of interesting challenges. Where should a virtual placement be set? Set it in, say, a community mental health team and you risk losing all those students who are not destined for that kind of placement setting: so in the end, we created an altogether different kind of reality, based on an allegory. This gives students a chance to play in a different world, freeing them to experiment a little.

The "difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees" gave us our inspiration. We created a wood, in which the student becomes an explorer and the placement a quest. It was important to make the software as friendly as possible so people could find their way around it with ease. We await feedback, but hope that the design of A Virtual Placement becomes quickly familiar and relatively easy to navigate.

Without the massive resources of Nintendo or DreamWorks, we faced other technical challenges, not least the size of the program to be downloaded. Since many of the users of the program do not have fast internet connections, the program is designed so it can be downloaded in segments, and once downloaded can be stored.

Perhaps the biggest challenge has been to make the program available to as wide a range of people as possible. Originally we planned to make a CD-Rom, but decided to experiment with a web-based format. By posting the whole program on the web, there is no intermediary between the program and the user; they can also access a discussion board to converse with other users, and to give feedback.

The "wood" has been designed to re-create situations, dilemmas and responses that can occur in live placements, with the aim of helping explorers consider the nature of good practice and to rehearse it. We hope it will be widely relevant throughout health and social care. The "trees" which the explorer visits are currently: self-knowledge; knowing and learning; becoming and being a professional; communicating; collaboration and conflict; making decisions; and evaluating and reflecting.

As it stands, A Virtual Placement focuses largely on the interpersonal basis of professional practice. But we do not see practice as confined to the interpersonal and would like to see the program grow in other directions - community action, for example. The format of the program allows for this kind of change and growth, either by creating additional trees in the wood or perhaps by considering an entirely different dimension in which explorers can continue their journey of practice learning.

We very much hope readers will visit A Virtual Placement and let us know how they get on.  

- The virtual placement software is free and can be downloaded from www.hcc.uce.ac.uk/virtualplacement

Mark Doel is professor of social work and head of the school of social work and RNIB rehabilitation studies at the University of Central England. Tarsem Singh Cooner is e-learning manager at the department of social policy and social work at the University of Birmingham. His company, TSC Productions, has a website at www.virtualtraining.co.uk